Think Your Job's Hard? Read This.
By Abigail Pesta
Photo Credit: Tomaz Levstek/iStock
Special Offer
What's the toughest gig in the world? It has to be dismantling roadside bombs before they blow up in your face. In her new nail-biter of a feature film, The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow tells the story of the heroic Army bomb technicians who spend their days sneaking up on improvised explosive devices, then disassembling them with their own hands. We asked Bigelow, director of ass-kicking action films like Point Break and Blue Steel, what drew her to the bomb squad.
Q: Your films have run the gamut from bloody crime dramas to sci-fi, but this one is more about psychological than physical action. What sparked it?
A: The screenwriter, Mark Boal, was embedded as a journalist with a bomb unit in Iraq, and I was fascinated by his stories—by the idea that these bomb technicians are always walking toward the thing that everybody else is running away from. It's kind of an epic, lonely walk that only the man in the bomb suit performs. I wanted to do a character study of someone who volunteers for a job like that.
Q: Where does the film get its name?
A: The Army guys speak of explosions as putting you in "the hurt locker."
Q: You shot in Jordan, in blazing 120-degree heat. Sounds like hell.
A: Well, it certainly was prohibitively hot! But we all sort of swung for the fences, especially Jeremy Renner, who had to wear a 100-pound bomb suit.
Q: The characters in your films are macho—cops, robbers, soldiers. What gives?
A: I choose material instinctually—at the heart of it are characters who are fresh, who provide opportunities to explore uncharted ground.
Q: Are you macho?
A: [laughs] No, I actually started out as a painter; eventually I began to look at films as an artistic medium, a canvas.
Q: What message do you hope your new film gets across?
A: These men are sort of the unsung heroes. I wanted to identify the price of their heroism—there is a cost to the courage. The job comes with a tremendous sense of purpose, but it almost ruins these guys for normal life.
Q: Yet the film suggests they enjoy it.
A: There's a book called War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and it says war is a drug. I wanted to explore that idea. War's dirty little secret: Sometimes men like it.
